A Combinatorial Auction-Based Approach to Staff Shift Scheduling in Restaurant Business

This study focuses on improving the productivity of restaurant business. The productivity of restaurant business in Japan is lower than other service industries because the approach to improve the productivity has depended on experience and intuition by human workers in the service field. This study tries to adopt engineering/science approaches to staff shift scheduling in restaurant business; combinatorial auction is applied. Combinatorial auction-based staff scheduling is a negotiation-based approach between workers and a manager to reach an agreement in the multi-objective optimization problem; workers want to work as much as they can. On the other hand, the manager tries to reduce the number of workers if the service level can be kept with high enough to fulfil the customer’s requirements. Resulting from the negotiation, the proposed method tries to find the staff shift schedule to realize maximization of service satisfaction composed by customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and manager satisfaction. The effectiveness of the proposed method is discussed using the results of computer experiments using real data obtained from the Japanese cuisine restaurant.